Discovering hidden countenance

The Mirror's Symbol

The mirrors symbolize the deception, the vaingloriousness and the impermanence of life and at the same time represents the opposite qualities like the truth, the eternity, the reality and the prudence. Sometimes it warns of what is false, misleading and help to see ourselves in a true reality. It is also a symbol of knowledge that shows the hidden aspects of the world and it is a form by which one can contemplate another dimension.

The Mirrors of the soul...

The mirrors of the soul is the form of inner knowledge and also the first step to take the path of virtue is to look inside yourself. The symbol of the mirror was very popular in the art and literature of Middle Ages, which created a new literary genre as a symbol of caution, since it allowed someone to know oneself and become virtuous and prudent.

Another issue related to the mirror is the magic and mystic appearance in it of creatures that are not visible otherwise, like ghosts and demons or hidden and unknown facets of the personality. Ancient beliefs are often attributed to the mirror as a reflective surface that has the ability to show things that are not possible to see in reality with clear eye. This was due to the sense of mystery that the mirror had the ability to reveal the past, the future, hidden objects an beings or distant events from the place where it was located.

The mirror has always had a negative value as a tool that allowed someone to see oneself, an attitude that can often cause the self-satisfaction and attachment to the knowledge of an appearance that has usually had an interpretation related to narcissism and arrogance and this value is usually represented by beautiful people who contemplates it out of pure vanity. The important thing is the quality of the mirror, meaning that its surface must be perfectly smooth and pure to obtain the maximum of the reflection and when it is done with a smooth treatment purified from all earthly stains, it may receives the purity of the incorruptible beauty. The soul which becomes a perfect mirror undergoes a transformation and through this participation there is therefore a correspondence between the subject and the reflection, so the soul ends up in the same part of the beauty that is targeted.

A Magic Mirror...

The use of the mirror is the oldest form of divination an is like the surface of the water that used to interrogate the divine spirits back in the middle ages. There's also a legend that Pythagoras had possessed a magic mirror in which he imprisoned the moon to read the future and also the mirror shows humans beings who do not exist or future actions. The mirror is also known in the psychological development of the child during the mirror stage. The child uses the mirror image to externalize his body. At a stage when the child has the scary experience of the absence of his mother, the mirror stage manifest the awareness reassuring unity of the bodies. In front of the mirror the baby will gradually identify his body and thus will take consciousness itself by waiting for a reaction from his reflection in the mirror. The mirror stage has a great symbolic value in the psychological development of the baby because forces it to realize that he is different from his mother and all the others around and at the same time the baby discovers parts of his body he did not know that they existed.Article by http://my-furniture.co.uk